Simon Jenkins blotted his homework

A “mammoth of research” is about to rise behind London’s St Pancras station, a biomedical centre costing £600m and housing about 1,250 “cutting-edge” scientists. Ask not its value. Science jeers at the idea. The UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation has already been dubbed a “cathedral of science”, justified by faith, not reason.

That’s just the first paragraph. Look how stupid it is. What are those quotation marks for? Who is being quoted? Who “dubbed” the biomedical centre a “cathedral of science”? Anyone? Apart from Simon Jenkins? What on earth does he mean “justified by faith, not reason”? He doesn’t say, he just goes on with very tired familiar “ooh I hate science” boilerplate.

This business of inventing quotations and implying that somebody is saying things when in fact it’s you who’s saying it reminds me of the Times story last year that said “there are fears” about Does God Hate Women? when there weren’t, it was just that the reporter thought there could be and so she might as well say there already were, without actually adducing any.

The last paragraph is striking too.

I share Rees’s glory in the wonder of science. I wish the wonder could be taught in schools, which still prefer to be kindergartens for lab technicians. But science research is one lobby among many. The BBC should not lavish it with favours against less-fashionable claimants for its platforms. One thing is for sure, Rees’s subsidies must come from taxes on the professions he most despises – banking and finance. I bet no one devotes a research grant or a Reith lecture to them.

Now why would anyone have a somewhat skeptical attitude toward banking and finance these days? I can’t imagine, can you? No indeed, it’s science that deserves all the opprobrium for being so fashionable, and pointless, and theiving, and faith-based, and money-grubbing, and cathedraly.

Perhaps Simon Jenkins was under the impression that there was an “opinion column” category of The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest… Or he’s another opinionated twit with critical reasoning skills somewhat inferior to those of the common house plant.

Here’s a poser: If one were to start a contest to mock incredibly stupid opinion-column writing, in whose “honor” would one name it? Even when considering only living, actively-writing nominees, I’m afraid there’s rather an embarrassment of riches. As much as I’d like to nominate Madeleine Bunting, she’s hands-down smarter than pretty much everyone who’s ever written a column for the Worldnet Daily. Then again, Worldnet Daily is an online-only pseudo-publication: If we limit ourselves to semi-regular columnists in daily newspapers with hard-copy circulation over 100,000, Madders might still be in the running…

It’s a very silly article. I don’t doubt that someone referred to the St Pancras centre as a ‘cathedral of science’ but the ‘cathedral of’ formulation is a very common one that only means something like ‘big and with grandeur’, that’s all. We have cathedrals of football and finance too, but they are not making metaphysical claims.

The article is astonishingly bad. It’s like a ragbag full of odd trifles, but it has no structure or overall argument, and not a shred of evidence. Which just goes to show the difference between Jenkins and science. Imran Khan’s response to it it clear and decisive. “It is ludicrous,” he says in his tagline, “to compare us [science] to a religion. We base our arguments on evidence, not faith.” And the spoof by Jon Butterworth is clever. See if you can guess which silly statement was made by Jenkins! What we are left with, though, is a question: Why would the Guardian publish this sort of stuff in on CiF? This kind of know-nothingness would look better in the religious press, where the cavilling would have some grip.

You may be sure that he’s not stupid but I have my doubts. This kind of thing has been commonplace amongst the British arts biased intelligentsia for a very long time. It is what caused us to fall badly behind Germany and the US in the closing years of the Nineteenth century and the process has never been arrested since. The kind of people who despise science and technology never got over the shock of the industrial revolution and had nothing but contempt for the self made men who largely made it possible. It takes two forms in the modern world the Jenkins/Appleyard school of ‘intellectual’ anti-science and the brain dead woo merchants of popular culture. The post-modernists are busy cheering from the sidelines.

I’m vaguely aware that he has form – I’ve seen Norm take him down a few times – but I don’t read him much (if at all), and I thought this piece was pretty staggering even for someone with form. And I said I was sure he wasn’t stupid because he was editor of the Economist – there must be a large pool of applicants for that job, so surely someone really stupid wouldn’t be the choice.

G, well, Bunting would always be my choice for the name of that award…

Oddly enough there IS one, in London. Greater in extent than any religious cathedral, still the centre of a world-wide effort to understand, and improve our knowledge of the world. And to protect that world. It is also a true “Garden of Earthly delights”. But one would not expect a twerp like SJ to realise that.

@ Greg. Tingey : Very true and you can just imagine what Jenkins would have said about Kew in the Eighteenth century, how it was a monumental folly and a waste of money to establish a botanical Garden when it could be used for growing cabbages. If he had been around in the 1840’s his scorn and mockery for the wonderful Palm House would have been limitless, why would anyone contemplate such a folly ? What need was there to collect plant specimens from around the world when the locals could do it themselves ? The related Crystal Palace and Great Exhibition would have sent him over the edge completely, there should be a word for the Scientific equivalent of Philistine, Jenkinsite will do for now.